Slouching Towards Gomorrah (57 page)

Eli Lehrer, a senior editor of
American Enterprise
magazine, writes, “How did speech codes become so pervasive in our supposed cradles of open inquiry? Experts point to two trends: the rise of 1960s radicals to positions of power on college campuses, and an influx of academically under-prepared minority students as a result of affirmative action.“
¹⁰
The 1960s radicals orated endlessly about freedom, but their authoritarian ambitions were always obvious and were realized when they reached positions of power and influence in the universities where freedom now means freedom to coerce others who have the wrong attitudes. Despite their rhetoric, it was never freedom the radicals sought, it was always power. That was what the culture war was about then, and it is what the culture war is about now: whose views of life and meaning or lack of meaning will dominate. Minorities, many of them placed in higher-echelon colleges than they were prepared for, banded together defensively, abetted by the ‘60s radicals in power, and achieved bans on politically inconvenient thoughts and arguments.

The effort to regiment thought and attitudes extends to primary and secondary schools. New York University’s Diane Ravitch compiles a seemingly endless list of nonsensical deletions and alterations of passages from literature used in tests. As might be expected, these are freighted with political correctness. One publisher stated that everything written before 1970 was biased. Ravitch points out the ridiculous extent to which publishers have gone to avoid stereotyping: “Asian Americans should not be portrayed
as academics; African Americans should not be portrayed as athletes; Caucasians should not be portrayed as businesspeople; men should not be portrayed as breadwinners; women should not be portrayed as wives and mothers. In the ideal world of education-think, women would be breadwinners; African Americans would be academics; Asian Americans would be athletes; and no one would be a wife or a mother.“
¹¹

Attempts at censorship are not confined to liberals. Paleocon-servatives object to references to dinosaurs or fossils because they imply evolution, but it is liberals who object to any mention of religion or religious holidays, including Thanksgiving.
¹²
What is left after the language and thought police have done their work are stories that have no geographical location or regional distinctiveness, in which older people are never ill, all conflicts are insignificant, men are fearful and women are brave, blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone, fantasy and magic are absent, and historical accuracy is ignored. “The result of all this relentless purging is dishonesty, a purposeful shielding of children from anything challenging, controversial, or just plain interesting. It is a process that drains literature of its life and blood, converts it into dreary reading materials, and grinds reading materials into pabulum.“
¹³

This is not, however, the worst of it. Ravitch notes with annoyance the tone of certainty in school textbooks, which “seem to share the same political orientation. Textbooks like Democratic presidents; textbooks don’t like Republican presidents.“
¹⁴
The industry appears to have been captured by the ethos of 1960s radicalism: the accomplishments of European and American civilization are downplayed or ignored so as not to be “Eurocentric,” while the defects of other civilizations are glossed over. All cultures are equal, except, in some cases, where the history of the United States is portrayed as one of unrelieved oppression and ignorance. “Several texts lionize the upheavals of the 1960s; they present the counterculture and student rebels as avatars of social justice, with no balanced discussion of the negative phenomena of that era, such as bombings, harassment of dissident professors and speakers on campus, and a sustained assault on social mores. The texts treat the Black Panthers as a beneficent social service organization, with little or no reference to their tactics of intimidation and violence.“
¹⁵

There is, of course, resistance to censorship. FIRE presses universities to protect freedom of expression, using litigation where necessary. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute publishes a guide to universities which, along with much other information, discloses the political leanings of the instruction provided. ISI also publishes magazines and provides speakers to counter leftist ideological dominance. The Federalist Society encourages diversity of opinion in law schools by arranging debates and panel discussions that present diverse views, some of them unrepresented in the classrooms. But these are efforts to make headway against the dominant ultra-liberal ethos of most campuses, and so far left-liberal efforts at repression have the upper hand.

Nor is political expression, the core of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, free from governmental suppression. Although this suppression is not explicitly ideological, it indicates the devaluing of political speech by state and federal legislatures and a worrisome attitude about such speech on the part of the Supreme Court. Repression here takes the form of laws regulating when such speech may occur in political campaigns, and how money may be contributed to candidates to enable them to reach mass audiences with their messages. The incentives for legislatures to enact such laws are obvious. Despite sanctimonious rhetoric about the need to purge politics of the corrupting influence of money and to avoid even the suspicion of corruption, it is clear that these laws are intended to, and do, have the effect of protecting incumbents from effective challenges at the polls. It is less clear, however, why the Supreme Court upholds such laws against First Amendment attacks when the reforms results are both to diminish political speech and to shift power among political speakers.

Buckley
v.
Valeo
in 1976
¹⁶
upheld portions of the Federal Election Campaign Act, one of several misbegotten post-Watergate gestures toward purity, which severely limited individual contributions to political campaigns on the theory that large contributions may lead to the corruption of politics or may create a public impression of corruption. The public-impression rationale, though without any empirical support, was used to justify contribution limits far below any that could realistically be thought to raise any possibility of actual corruption. Had limits so severe been in effect at the
time, they would have made it impossible for Eugene McCarthy to accept the large contributions necessary for his primary challenge that led Lyndon Johnson not to run for reelection in 1968.

Any hope that
Buckley
was an aberration that the fading of overwrought Watergate passions and the appointment of new justices would remedy was disappointed in 2000 by
Nixon
v.
Shrink Missouri Government PAC.
¹⁷
A Missouri law set limits on campaign contributions for state elections that were considerably more severe than the limits set by federal law. The Supreme Court once more held that corruption or the possible appearance of corruption were adequate grounds to regulate contributions. Justice Stevens concurred, insisting on “one simple point. Money is property; it is not speech.” That point, it may be suggested, was too simple. A soapbox is property, not speech, but the speech of an orator in Hyde Park would be much less effective without it. Television equipment, paid for by contributions, is property, but speech could not reach a mass electorate without it. A contributor provides the electronic soapbox for a candidate who shares the contributors views on issues. The contribution makes it possible for both the candidate and the contributor to speak. The lower the contributions allowed, the more time and energy must be devoted to fundraising, and the less may be devoted to the development and delivery of the message.

Justice Breyer’s concurrence, while conceding that money enables speech, argued that limiting the size of the largest contributions serves “to democratize the influence that money itself may bring to bear upon the electoral process.” If the democratization rationale is sufficient to limit political participation through contributions, there seems no reason, in principle, why that argument would not justify limiting political expression by those who wield “disproportionate” influence by other means—journalists, union members and students who can canvass door to door, celebrities, and, of course, incumbent politicians. Regulating campaign contributions alone censors the expression of views by one segment of the public and shifts political influence from that group to others not similarly restrained.

The Court has turned the First Amendment inside out, freeing uninhibited pornography and obscenity from democratic control while allowing the suppression of some forms of political expression.
It is perhaps not too speculative to think that laws enlarging penalties for crimes that appear to be “hate crimes” may be the forerunner of a movement of speech codes from American campuses into the public arena, and perhaps the more widespread use of compulsory “sensitivity training.” Given the overwhelming likelihood that the Left would have more success in suppressing the expression of ideas and attitudes than would the rest of us in suppressing obscenity, it might, under present circumstances, be the part of wisdom not to endorse the concept of censorship.

The American situation with respect to race remains much as it was seven years ago. Positive signs in some areas are paired with negative signs in others. The major setback in race relations is the elites’ continuing insistence upon racial preferences for some—which are, of course, simultaneously racial penalties for others. The results are entirely predictable. In the United States, as in all other countries where preferences of this sort have been awarded, the result is increased tribalism and social divisiveness.

The preeminent victory for the Olympians, and disaster for public policy, was, of course, the Supreme Court’s decision in
Grutter
v.
Bollinger,
¹⁸
backed by an opinion of transparent sophistry. The result was to be expected, however, since the Court is in thrall to Olympianism but cannot reason persuasively on this topic because all of the legal and prudential rationalizations for racial preferences were exploded some time ago.

Barbara Grutter, a white resident of Michigan, was denied admission to the university’s law school despite having a grade point average (GPA) and a score on the law school aptitude test (LSAT) that would have guaranteed her admission had she been black, Hispanic, or Native American. She sued the law school and various university functionaries, alleging violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The law school responded by claiming that “diversity” is essential to its educational function as a first-class law school. Grutter lost, five to four, and the reasons given by the Court majority reveal the dishonesty of the “diversity” rationale that is now the favorite locution of intellectual Olympians in justifying antiwhite discrimination.

The established law was, but apparently is no more, that a racial classification could be justified only by a “compelling governmental interest,” must be narrowly tailored to meet that interest, and limited in duration, and that courts must apply strict scrutiny to ensure that those conditions are met. None of these conditions was met in the program of racial discrimination the Court upheld. Justice O’Connor’s opinion for the Court majority said, “We hold that the Law School has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body.” The reason given was that “The Law School’s educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer.” That is astounding. In no other case has the Court accepted the word of an institution that racial discrimination is essential to its performance. As described in chapter 8, when VMI, a military institute, argued that preserving an all-male student body was necessary to the kind of education and training it offered, the Court simply brushed the argument aside without a trace of deference. Deferring to the judgment of the discriminating institution that its discrimination serves a compelling interest is to eviscerate the test of strict scrutiny. The difference between
VMI
and
Grutter
cannot be explained on legal grounds. The explanation is political: a majority of the Court is dedicated to feminism and to affirmative action for blacks. If those political commitments require legally irreconcilable results in different cases, so be it.

The opinion attempted to disguise what the Court was doing in language that columnist Michael Kinsley aptly satirized: the law school “‘engages in highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file.’ It ‘awards no mechanical, predetermined diversity “bonuses” based on race or ethnicity.’ Instead, it makes ‘a flexible assessment of applicants’ talents, experiences, and potential…’ blah, blah, blah.“
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If one were to assign real meaning to the school’s vapid rhetoric, the impossibility of its claims is apparent. In the year 2000, there were 3,432 applicants. If we assume that fully half of them were automatic acceptances or rejections, that would leave 1,716 for “highly individualized, holistic” assessment in terms of each one’s “talents, experiences, and potential.” Or if two-thirds were automatically accepted or rejected, 1,144 would require that degree of attention. Even a three-quarters rate would leave 858 applicants for a “highly individualized holistic review.” Anybody
who has served on a law school admissions committee knows that is impossible. Each file contains not merely the applicants GPA and LSAT score but a list of extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, and his own essay on why he is a splendid candidate for admission, an essay that must be evaluated for content and style. Account must also be taken of the quality of the college the applicant attended and the difficulty of the courses taken in order to judge the weight to be given his GPA.